Archive for July 2008

I’ve been playing with the idea — so I can become famous or something. I know I don’t have a shot in hell of making a ton of money on the book, but it’s mostly to increase the bottom line for consulting and speaking engagements.

Good Experience has a great read on writing a book, and all the things no one tells you when you do it. Seth Godin also has some tips.

Mini Golf is exactly as it sounds — a miniature golf course played through a Adobe Flash application right there on MySpace. It sounds like a nifty idea, but there have been a fare number of Flash applications that have done the same thing, some of them better with a high quality, and this one asks you to buy the gold version the page.

It’s fun, but tough. The one usability issue I have is there is no way to preview the complete hole (move the cursor around) to see where you have to shoot.

The other issue: it’s a social networking site. You would think a ranking system would be in place, versus your friends and everyone on MySpace. But alas, it’s a one player game, essentially.

The hardest issue regarding skinning a SharePoint site is the CSS that MOSS generates — it’s cryptic, and more often than not, it shouldn’t be changed. Heather Solomon has a great reference guide that covers just about every CSS class SharePoint has, complete with screenshots.

I’ve worked with my fair share of clients, coming up with something cool or snazy, presenting it to them, they look at it, and the first thing that comes out of their mouth is, “I don’t like it” or “I like this design over here,” pointing at another design produced by another designer. There’s the usual complaint of, “but our design is better” or you mutter something under your breath.

The clients don’t always pick the best design

The design you are presenting might be something rich and inviting, with all the bells and whistles you throw on there. The other design might be something clean and sharp, but not exciting. Not exciting sells, especially in certain less progressive environments, like governments or large corporations. The stakeholder or final decision maker probably isn’t a designer, so they really can’t tell the difference between rich and not rich, just what they like or don’t like. Some of the sites I’ve designed I hate, but the client loved, because it hit their target audience.

The clients are influenced by a local designer

There’s nothing like being there in person when showing off a design, and if you can’t do this, you’re already at a disadvantage — you can’t discuss some of your motivations for doing a particular design, or taking a particular angle. Sometimes you are set up to fail from the very start, and it’s best to recognize it and put your best foot forward, even if you know you aren’t going to be the winning design.

Sometimes the best design isn’t the most usable design

When I was working at Escrow.com, eBay was one of our partners. We redesigned the user interface of the site, and on every iteration, we made it look more like eBay. On every iteration, revenue increased. As much as the user interface designer I worked with hated it, we had to keep going that way. Many users might consider eBay one of the ugliest sites on the web, but when revenue rises, you keep going that direction. If you don’t, you are ignoring your users. Follow the obvious roadsigns.

Design is subjective

Totally true, but the best argument I’ve set for some of the clients is, “let’s try some A/B testing.” If it’s a simple website, and the site gets a fair amount of traffic, you’ll know quickly which design works better. Changing the colors of certain buttons in a design can affect the conversion rate. As much as you would like to tell the stakeholder they aren’t the audience, sometimes it’s best to do just that by involing end users.

The best websites are the sites that do something for you without doing any work, and Flight Stats fits that bill. The site is prefect for the traveller that wants to know how long their flight is delayed, and other information like on-time statistics and airports around the country. Everything is easy to use (notice I didn’t say attractive, I said easy to use), and most importantly, they send you updates on how long your flight is delayed to all kinds of devices.

Virtual Cat is a take off on Pokey. It really could be titled “when good apps go bad”. It has a slight cute factor, but doesn’t have as many hot spots or actions seemingly that Pokey has, and it’s kind of a one trick cat. It would be more fun if there were some playtoys or something to give to the cat like Pokey has.

The advantage, though, is that it’s not nearly the download that Pokey was, so it shows up quicker. And this developer added advertising, so at least someone’s getting it.

One of the struggles that we’ve had where I work at even after a year was how we document SharePoint sites. This is the first in the series (and I’ll eventually make a full blown page to send out to other blogs) — Content Type Matrix. It’s a really simple Excel spreadsheet, but contains just enough information for an agile environment to document the content types without getting too wrapped up in the details.

Once upon a time, I worked for an internet postage company. Seems like decades ago, but it’s core product was a Windows application that allowed the user to print postage (think of it, the equivalent of actual money!) from your computer. Due to the USPS’ requirements, the security for the client was off the charts — even higher than 128-bit encryption.

We actually tried to do the impossible, which was print from a web-based client, and we got it to work. It’s wasn’t production level code, but with a few tweeks here or there, we could have hit that mark. There was no indication if we were going to be allowed to release that client, but the usability wasn’t too bad, especially for skunkworks project.

Soon after that experiment, the company purchased another company that developed a shipping client for shipping centers. It was pretty advanced for it’s time: it did all the AJAX stuff before Jesse James Garrett got rich off of coining the term AJAX. Other than a few glitches, it seemed to work pretty well.

Except it didn’t.

When you visited the clients that used the application, they hated it, and here’s why:

It was slow

Performed poorly over DSL

Was a bloated mess and a fragile application.

The web client worked only on Internet Explorer 5.0, and as soon as 5.5 was installed, the application broke.

So what are the lessons? I always thought the internet postage client should have been a web application, and conversely the shipping application should have been native to Windows, because almost every one of these locations had a Windows system. As much as I keep repeating that the web is a fad, I think it depends on the following on what you select to be the platform to develop on:

Who’s the audience?

The needs of a bunch of workers telemarketing day in and day out are much different than a sales guy that’s going to make 10 sales calls a day. The telemarketers are going to want hot keys, they definitely don’t want to use a mouse, the latency means less phone calls, which means less money in their pocket.

That’s usability that costs the company in revenue, so they’re going to want a rich or native application. The sales guy making those 10 calls doesn’t mind taking a minute or two longer to futz over a dial up connection or a slow DSL connection, so a web application is just fine. It’s the difference between a casual vs. an expert user.

What’s their platform?

Take a good look at the audience’s technology before you select the platform. Is the audience has a bunch of different platforms and technologies they are working with, that’s an easy answer — go with a web application. If they are on fast connections, look at Flash. If they are on a single platform (Windows, for instance), a native application isn’t a bad idea.

How fast is their connection?

Native applications, once installed, don’t have to be downloaded again. Rich media applications have to be downloaded through a web browser, usually in one chunk. Web applications have latency depending on the connection. Which would you rather be using while working in Alaska, depending on how much data you have to push around?

How often does this need to be updated?

There are advantages, of course, to a web-based application, because you don’t have to worry about backwards compatibility, a code base that’s branched all to hell, and 18 different flavors of windows. If you are going to update the application every day, a native or even a rich media application might not be the way to go. However, if there are long cycles between updates, and there’s a way to push the updates cleanly, then a native application is okay.

All of the above should be considered even before selecting a development platform, because each affects usuability. It’s about the appropriate technology for the appropriate audience, something developers forget.

It’s my blog, and I can feature who I want, so I’m featuring a friend of mine’s blog, Heavy Little Objects. Mack Reed writes a blog about the little things in our life, the trinkets, bottle caps and the like, that occupy space with us. He does it just for the pure joy of writing and documenting a piece of his life.

Who doesn’t like free stuff? Another application trying to turn your MySpace page into one-stop shopping spot, Free Stuff Times draws from items that are listed on it’s blog about free stuff on the internet. It seems like of a great way to shill content from advertisers, and some of the items smack of Amway promotions.

It’s not a particularly good implementation of a great idea, but it shows how you can use MySpace as a decent advertising platform.

I’ll be the very first to admit I do a lousy job highlighting RSS Feeds on this site, and I just got around to adding a subscribing via email function. Many sites do a wonderul job of it. The truth is that the vast majority of users still don’t know was an RSS Feed is (Hey Dave Winer, just because it’s called Really Simple Syndication doesn’t mean people know what syndication means).

So here are a few tips:

Add a subscribe via email function (which I’m going to add soon). Feedburner has a few options, and make the text simple, like what I wrote on this site.

Make the RSS Feed image big so people can find it (and i find those little feedburner images too small)

Add a link next to this called, “What’s this?” I’ll be adding a page explaining what RSS is, and most sites, especially sites with less sophisticated users, should add this.

You want to build a public facing website using SharePoint? It’s not a trivial matter (and not something you would expect the corner dentist to be doing), but it’s a great tool for it, and where I work at, we’ve implemented a few really large websites, and I’m in the middle of designing a large one for a government agency in Alaska.

J. Boye has a white paper on what to consider if you want to implement SharePoint for a public facing site. It’s a fair article (and I think worth less than the $200 I paid for it), but if you need some kind of opinion to give to your executives, this is it.

Where I work at, we have this phenomenal client list, but there’s a good chance you’ll never see it. Most of the work we do is intranet work, and it’s boring.

It also pays well. Very well.

A lot of consultants want to work on only the most exciting projects, where I’m trying to angle for less exciting government and corporate clients, because they have work no one else wants to do. Smart consulting companies do well with these clients, because they aren’t competing with many other clients.

For example, tons of agencies pitch websites for Paramount movies.

Few agencies or firms pitch intranets at Paramount because, well, it’s boring. No one’s going to see it. Yet, on my company’s client list, we list Paramount as a client, and our work may be more important to Paramount than a website for a single movie.